In a manufacturing process of a semiconductor device, chemical mechanical polishing (hereinafter referred to as “CMP”) is used to flatten, for example, a metallic film or a polycrystalline silicon film on a substrate, or an insulating film buried in a trench.
Next-generation devices of a three-dimensional layer stack type of the 19 nm generation or later are particularly required to ensure high flatness in a CMP process in order to reduce focus errors in an exposure process, which result from miniaturization and the increase in the number of stacked layers.